Color film has been a possibility since the beginning of cinema. Technical problems and economic circumstances early on meant that it was not until the 1950s that color was viable in the film industry.
Early Color
The earliest examples of color film were hand-colored, frame by frame, as seen in Segundo de Chomon’s The Golden Beetle (1907).
Hand-coloring films became extremely impractical as the number of film prints in distribution continued to rise. One proposed solution was Pathecolor, a semi-automated device for stenciling prints in which the colors maintained a fair registration as characters moved on the screen. The semi-automated method of coloring film was similar to, albeit less advanced than, the colorizing of black-and-white films which occurred in the 1980s.
During the 1920s, tinting became a popular method for adding color to film. This involved dyeing the film’s base; by either dyeing the print or hand-tinting the image, a single color would show through the image’s light areas. Specific colors would be used to imply specific effects–for instance, red for day and blue for night.
With the rise of modern sound technologies, and the recording of sound directly onto film, the practice of tinting and toning became less viable, since the dyes used to stain the filmstrip could affect the quality of the optical soundtrack. Kodak introduced Sonochrome film stock, whose soundtrack areas were not affected by the dyeing process. However, it was decided that filming with a color film stock made more sense than converting black-and-white images to color.
Technicolor
Technicolor was first introduced in the mid-1920s. It was a two-color process, in which two filmstrips–one red and one green–were pasted together to produce a composite print. Like other early innovations in color film, there were technical limitations, particularly the double thickness of the filmstrip and the amount of light required when filming. In 1932, Technicolor was replaced by a two-color format–a blue-and-red “bi-pack” and a separate green negative base. This process had no effect on the optical soundtrack. Technicolor became the main process for color films in the U.S. until the 1950s. John Ford’s 1948 film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is an excellent example of a Technicolor film. In this scene from the film, the color contrasts between interior and exterior areas demonstrate the ability of Technicolor to reproduce color tones and hues, whether in direct light or artificial light.
Further Advancements and Aesthetic Innovations
By the early 1950s, Eastman Color had replaced Technicolor as a negative source, owing to the convenience of shooting a single negative in a smaller camera. Technicolor would soon refer only to the laboratory process that produced the three separately dyed negatives.
Color film results from a chemical process, so it is never exactly like the everyday world. Color is created by light shining though film, therefore giving objects a certain luminosity. The artificiality of the medium can result in many creative effects, including the illusion of reality. One example of the creative use of color is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964); filming with Eastman Color, Antonioni created a sterile landscape through an expressive and abstract use of color.
Color can also be used to help emphasize the time and place in which a film is set. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) used a palette similar to that of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings to create the look of eighteenth-century England.
Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) used color in a manner reminiscent of the tinting process of the 1920s. Throughout the film, colors are used to represent particular locations–for example, yellow for scenes taking place in Mexico and metallic blue for scenes taking place in Ohio.